simmsimaging

It would also be great if we could paste image into 3DCoat and maintain transparency. If I paste a cut-out layer from Photoshop it comes in with a solid white background behind it, even though I can import the same layer directly and it works fine that way. b

I'm trying to do some "sort of precise" positioning of label art on a bottle. I have the art in pieces on layers in a psd, and have brought that psd into 3DC to better line up the elements on the bottle. The problem is that the tranform tool is a bit cumbersome: you have to marquee a section of the layer (done in the UV Editor window so it's on a 2D plane) but it's not easy to move around because the preview in the viewport does not update "live". I get a lot of weird errors with piece of image missing or getting distorted as well. Is it possible to just add a simple "move tool" like in Photoshop to just move the existing layers around in 2D and not transform them each time, which seems to re-interpolate them even for a simple move and is degrading the quality from what I can see. That and a live update as you move the layers around would be a huge improvement for texturing. Am I missing a way to do this that is already built in? Thanks /b

I have gone through the manual several times, but it's not always the best for figuring out how to actually use the stuff. The tools are generally well described, but in some cases not really in much depth (i.e the density parameter in voxels) and it's not very clear how you actually use many of them (what the workflow might actually be) - at least not well enough for me to figure it out I appreciate all the help though - I'm making some progress now for sure. b

Ah - I see. Thanks. I did try the MV export so I could increase the mesh size, but at lower settings I had the same issue, and when I raised the settings up higher it just hung (or I gave up after 15min). I clearly need to spend a bit more time with it. Thanks.

Thanks very much for taking the time to do this. I am currently working on quadrangulating the new mesh to see how it works out for me here. (I am choosing to quadrangulate the object from the VoxTree, and then in the retopo window choosing 'merge to scene for MV'. The process is quite slow.) I am not really clear on what it means to have a fully baked model in 3DC. I know there is a texture baking tool that is for baking normal/displacement maps but it's not at all clear to me at what stage you do that, or what a workflow would be. I'm hoping to have more time to dig into the docs and clarify that. One thing I did notice in your quadrangluated, and in the texture baked versions, is that the distortion of the box shape is still there, but much reduced. I'm gathering the improvement is due to the change in density(?) However, while much better, the problem is still kinda there. Is it possible to get a more perfect shape or is this a limitation of 3DC at the moment? I will also try the straight voxel export with reduction on the 1X mesh to see if that still crashes my computer. Thanks again. b

Thanks for that explanation. I originally shifted to the DP method because I found I was having resolution/detail problems with MV painting that DP helped me avoid, but I gather I'm better to do surface sculpting in MV either way. I fully understand that the problems are mainly due to my lack of understanding 3DC, but you have to admit it gets pretty hairy with all the various ways of doing things and the esoteric values involved. Thanks again for helping out. b

Thanks very much for looking into this. I am not clear on what the density increase/decrease actually does - and could not find an answer in the manual. I arrived at 8X by increasing the resolution, but noticed the density increase/decrease seems to say the same thing (i.e x2, x4 etc.) but without increasing the sculpting resolution. What is that for then? I definitely tried these operations many times though, so it is very possible there are bits and pieces hiding in there somewhere, but I could not find them to get rid of them, but was not really sure how to move the voxels to a new file - thanks. b

The problem with experimenting with the quadrangulation methods is that it takes a really, really long time to run each one on this mesh (like 10-15 minutes sometimes) and I just don't have enough spare time to test many options In any case, I found your gallery thread on modo for the image above, and I tried this method and it worked great! Zbrush decimation got my 10 million poly mesh down to something like 500K and it looks great. This is probably the way to go for now - much appreciated! I think the 3DC poly reduction may be a good route later, but for now it just crashes out. I'll try it again when that bug is ironed out a bit more. b

Thanks for the input James. I gave it a try for a couple of hours last night, and I guess it will come easier with time I'm not a modeler so the tools are probably more comfortable/fast for someone who can poly model, but my hope with 3DC was to avoid poly modeling. Perhaps one of the commercially available vids would help clarify the process, but I'm not really into paying for that until I have a better sense that it will get me the results I'm looking for. In any case, I have to agree with Polyxo that auto-topology would be better for cases like this, where I don't need a "perfect" mesh for manipulating later. I'm sure there is a very good reason why it behaves as it does (works well on complex shapes, but kinda rough on simple shapes) and hopefully it is something that can be remedied. b

Still getting a messed up mesh but by exporting the voxel model for MV painting I was able to get the best case (much like the first pic posted in this thread, but the outer edges that are chewed up don't really show and I can fix them later if necessary). However, trying to get some decent detail in the depth map via painting and/or sculpting is just not happening very easily. In the end I exported the mesh and reimported it for DP painting and then made a much higher res map (8K) so I could get some even moderate detail in the depth map. It's still not great IMO, but it's okay for this model. However, now I'm getting this weird faceting happening along the edges of the mesh whenever I try and paint with depth. See the pics below - one shows the wire so you can see how the flow is. There are a couple of 5 point poly's in there, but this problem happens wherever I paint on this model. Any idea what this problem is? Right now I'm feeling pretty disappointed with the modeling/sculpting aspects of 3DC. Painting is awesome, but this is getting a bit crazy trying to build anything with any kind of detail and get it back out again in one piece. Maybe it's just me? b New smoothing (?) problem when painting with depth only, DP mode:

So I tried to increase the res, but it just resulted in a much slower process and arrived at the same problem. I also tried the newest build and exporting with poly reduction, but it crashes instantly everytime I tried so I may have to wait for another build for that ?? In the interim, I just created a voxel primitive cube, upped the res once (to 35mb - not sure how to really gauge the res using MB, but that's what it said) and hit quadrangulate. The result is below - Polyxo is right, there is an issue with retopology and regular shapes. This seems to be way off IMO, and if this is what happens to a simple cube isn't it reasonable to expect some pretty wild results with more complex shapes? This one was done quadrangulated with the options at 4,5,and 3 million polys and smoothing at 1,10,and 15. They all produced various versions of this problem. Is there a better way to get a clean mesh or do you have to manually retopologize to get it? Thanks /b

Thanks Polyxo and Tony. Tony - almost missed your reply, pretty subtly tucked away in there I am not sure what is happening there, but it does looks like two objects, and, oddly, when I zoom into the object in the retopo window I can actually find another copy of the whole mesh inside it, but it's about 1/3 the size. The voxel model is a single object, and does not have anything inside it that I can see. Very weird - any idea what that is about? Polyxo: thanks, I will grab that beta and give it a try. b

Thanks for the help. I have been trying this approach and running into the same problem of my mesh falling apart. As soon as it hits the retop room you can see the mesh is a mess (see image below), and short of manually redoing it I can't seem to get a decent result. Is it always necessary to manually retopo a voxel sculpt, or is there likely something wrong with my approach/file? I have uploaded the 3DC file if anyone has a moment to look at it and see if they can get a decent quadrangulation out of it I would appreciate it. b File: Filename: Splash_Sculpt_01_04.zip Filesize: 14.3 Mb Download Link: http://www.simmsimaging.com/xfile/3o7xqwmwe07z Image of problem:

I'm finally getting some time again to play with 3DC for sculpting (use it mostly for painting) and I'm having a lot of problems figuring out how to use the voxel sculpting, and get the mesh back out again for use in Max/modo etc. It seems really hard to get nice clean hi-res details in voxels, they always appear a bit... chunky? and smoothing problems seem to be regular. However, upping the res a few times certainly helped. Is lowering the density supposed to help that problem too? Anyway - having gotten a moderate level of detail I thought I would sculpt the higher res details in the paint or sculpting rooms. The problem is the mesh comes in with really poor detail when I use quadrangulate for per-pixel. When I tried using the micro-vertex mode I got better detail in the key areas, but other parts of the mesh are totally screwed up. (see imagaes - the one shows the voxel model and the other the MV exported version). What am I doing wrong? Is there an easy way to get a nice clean version of the voxel sculpt over to the paint room without losing all the detail? btw - I did try just exporting straight out of the voxel room, but the resulting mesh was a 10,000,000 poly monster - a bit cumbersome to work with Any advice or help would be appreciated as the docs are a bit thin on the ground for this stuff. b

The visibility controls for objects and materials are a bit clunky if you are working with multiple sub-objects. There is also a bit of conflict between the visibility control for sub-objects and the one for materials. If you hide by sub-object and then show and hide by material the sub-object does not update so it still shows it as invisible in the palette. To get it to work from sub-object again you have to click show and hide again. It would be good if changing visibility in one would update the other. Also: there is no quick way to isolate only one object visibility using materials or sub-objects. It would be handy to have a feature like Photoshop where you can alt-click on the eye icon and it would hide all other sub-objects or all other materials etc. b

Agreed.

It says "fps: 35 Free: 11199MB, Pointers 1241784 " That is when I have imported the part that does not show up properly. b

Looking that way, but there is no real indicator that I know of to be sure. The poly count of the total objects is about 400K in Max, but I am having problem before getting all of the pieces in, so probably more like 250-300K. I have four 4K maps in the 3DC file as well, the 5th one is where I have problems right now.

Nope, it seems to be something else. I imported the same bunch in a different order and now it's another part that is coming in black. Looking at the materials it looks like the normal map for the black object is different - darker blue. Can the normal map actually invert the normals? Not sure what the deal is, but I am unable to paint on the black objects. Another note about them: if I turn on "environment shade" instead of smooth shade they show up as grey (default import colour like all the other parts) so you don't see the black anymore, but you still can't paint on them. Thanks for the input though, appreciate the help. b

I will give it a try, but I have already rebuilt it about 4-5 times trying to import all the pieces. Different parts come out with this problem at different times, not sure if it's about the order or what it is. I'll give it another go though, just to be sure. b

While waiting for some help on this I was playing with other export options and it just made me more confused I exported the same object set out of Max as an fbx file instead of .obj and it imports into 3DC with 27 uv sets, but all have blank names by default. How do you possibly control this so you can choose which objects can share a UV set and texture, and which get there own individual ones? b

Thanks, I gave it a try but it did not seem to help. I am able to import the same model on it's own in a new file with no issues, but as soon as I try to merge it into the current working file it comes in either totally black, or black and partially missing - see the attached image. The model is there in some way because wireframe view shows the whole object, but you can't paint on it properly. Is this possibly some kind of memory related issue? Wondering if 3DC and my computer just cannot handle the textures/mesh sizes involved so this is what it does? b

Every one in a while I import an object for PP painting and it comes in with an all black texture, and when painting in the viewport nothing seems to happen. Occasionally they also come in with many faces hidden, or with a strange greeked text opacity map. Not sure if this is all one problem, or different things, but anyone know why this would happen? It's only the odd time and I can't figure out what I'm doing different (importing .obj files out of Max). Thanks in advance b

Just to clarify this issue: the uV naming now seems to be working, thanks Andrew, but I am not at all clear on how the UV sets get determined in a multi-object import. I exported a model out of Max. It has 27 separate objects as parts. Each has a unique name like "hinge1", "rivet 2" etc. They came from 5 layers in Max, and there are 5 material id's assigned to them. I used some Unwrap UV modifiers to arrange some objects UV coordinates so that I could put several of them together on single texture maps, but each has it's own uv's. I export that out of Max. When I import for per-pixel painting in 3DC the dialog box I see 10 UVsets (so 10 materials) and each is name some variation of "wire1133002" (wire and some string of random numbers). What I don't get is: 1) Why 10 UV sets? Where are these coming from - why not 5 for the material ID's or 27 for the unique objects? When I do import them I see all 27 subobjects in 3DC, so it sees them all on some level. I have no idea how to control that properly. 2) Why the odd name wire/number name? If 3DC is seeing the sub-object names - which it does because each has its proper name in the sub-object list, then why isn't the UV set getting named properly too? Thanks in advance for any help. b

A quick question about the importing: I find that sometimes when I export a group of objects as .obj (from Max) and import to 3DC the import gives me one UV set and object, although the sub-objects show up fine in the list, and sometimes the import will show a different uV set for each object, so each gets its own texture. How do you control that? Also: 3DC often generates a name like "wire11199302" for the uv sets of each object - could it use the sub-object name instead so we can tell which object is which on import and name the uv set properly? Thanks b